Leaks of internal National Security Agency documents began to dominate the headlines in June, and the conversation around surveillance has changed dramatically. The surveillance techniques have been denounced as "almost Orwellian" by a federal judge, and Congress is debating whether mass surveillance should be stopped entirely.

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who pushed the spy agency into the global spotlight, has stayed mostly quiet in recent months. But he broke that silence recently, sitting down for two days of interviews with one of the trio of journalists he gave the documents to, Barton Gellman.

The headline splashed on the front page of The Washington Post on Christmas Eve was no holiday gift for the intelligence community. "Edward Snowden: I already won," read the headline, atop one of several new pictures of the leaker.

His goal, he told Gellman, was not necessarily to ban bulk surveillance, but to give the public a chance to weigh in. And that has happened, no matter what the outcome.

"All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals."

"For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished," he said. "I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself."

Lead-up to a leak

Snowden made the decision to leak after his colleagues in the intelligence agency continued to ignore his concerns about the public's forced blindness. The intelligence agencies and their supposed overseers had become a "graveyard of judgment," he said.

To critics who say he could have raised his concerns through more conventional channels, he says he did so.

"I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’ How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?"

As to the suggestion that he is disloyal, he is dismissive.

"There is no evidence at all for the claim that I have loyalties to Russia or China or any country other than the United States,” said Snowden. “I have no relationship with the Russian government. I have not entered into any agreements with them... If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public."

US intelligence officials have expressed concern that the files could have been copied by foreign governments. There's no way that happened, Snowden said.

Snowden demurred when asked about his personal life, but he did offer a glimpse, describing himself as something of an "ascetic" and an "indoor cat."

"It has always been really difficult to get me to leave the house,” he said. “I just don’t have a lot of needs... Occasionally there’s things to go do, things to go see, people to meet, tasks to accomplish. But it’s really got to be goal-oriented, you know. Otherwise, as long as I can sit down and think and write and talk to somebody, that’s more meaningful to me than going out and looking at landmarks.”

No one accompanied Snowden to the interviews, and Gellman, the reporter, saw no one nearby, although he noted that "it would be odd if Russian authorities did not keep an eye on him." Snowden has had continuous Internet access, and he speaks daily with the lawyers and journalists who are close to him.

"Alternative Christmas message" for the UK

The day after the Post interview was published, Britain's Channel 4 broadcast an "alternative Christmas message" from Snowden; he struck a more activist tone, saying that the people of the UK and the US should work to "end mass surveillance."

Earlier this month, US District Judge Richard Leon had called the NSA bulk data program "almost Orwellian," but Snowden noted that technology today allows governments to go even further. He said:

The types of collection in [Orwell's] book—microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us—are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person...

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.